Related papers: E. coli chemotaxis is information-limited
Microorganisms often perform chemotaxis, (i.e., sensing and moving toward a region with a higher concentration of an attractive chemical) by changing the rate of tumbling for random walk. We studied several models with internal adaptive…
This note works out an advection-diffusion approximation to the density of a population of E. coli bacteria undergoing chemotaxis in a one-dimensional space. Simulations show the high quality of predictions under a shallow-gradient regime.
Understanding how bacteria move in porous media is critical to applications in healthcare, agriculture, environmental remediation, and chemical sensing. Recent work has demonstrated that E. coli, which moves by run-and-tumble dynamics in a…
A cell routinely responds to one of many competing environmental cues. A fundamental question is whether the cell follows the cue prioritized by its internal signaling network or the cue that carries the most external information. We…
In natural environments, solid surfaces present both opportunities and challenges for bacteria. On one hand, they serve as platforms for biofilm formation, crucial for bacterial colonization and resilience in harsh conditions. On the other…
Information theory has explained the organization of many biological phenomena, from the physiology of sensory receptive fields to the variability of certain DNA sequence ensembles. Some scholars have proposed that information should…
We introduce a generic, purely mechanical model for environment sensitive motion of mammalian cells that is applicable to chemotaxis, haptotaxis, and durotaxis as modes of motility. It is able to theoretically explain all relevant…
In nature, microorganisms must often cope with hostile environmental conditions. To do so they have developed sophisticated cooperative behavior and intricate communication capabilities, such as: direct cell-cell physical interactions via…
When a single cell senses a chemical gradient and chemotaxes, stochastic receptor-ligand binding can be a fundamental limit to the cell's accuracy. For clusters of cells responding to gradients, however, there is a critical difference: even…
Isogenic Escherichia coli growing exponentially in a constant environment display large variation in growth-rates, division-sizes and generation-times. It is unclear how these seemingly random cell cycles can be reconciled with the precise…
Despite major environmental and genetic differences, microbial metabolic networks are known to generate consistent physiological outcomes across vastly different organisms. This remarkable robustness suggests that, at least in bacteria,…
The repertoire of neural activity patterns that a cortical network can produce constrains the network's ability to transfer and process information. Here, we measured activity patterns obtained from multi-site local field potential (LFP)…
Through evolution, bacteria have developed the ability to perform chemotactic motion in order to find nourishment. By adopting a machine learning approach, we aim to understand how this behavior arises. We consider run-and-tumble agents…
Run-and-tumble chemotaxis is one of the representative search strategies of an odor source via sensing its spatial gradient. The optimal ways of sensing and control in the run-and-tumble chemotaxis have been analyzed theoretically to…
Collective migration -- the directed, coordinated motion of many self-propelled agents -- is a fascinating emergent behavior exhibited by active matter that has key functional implications for biological systems. Extensive studies have…
Hybrid models of chemotaxis combine agent-based models of cells with partial differential equation models of extracellular chemical signals. In this paper, travelling wave properties of hybrid models of bacterial chemotaxis are…
E. coli chemotactic motion in the presence of a chemoattractant field has been extensively studied using wet laboratory experiments, stochastic computational models as well as partial differential equation-based models (PDEs). The most…
Aerotaxis is the particular form of chemotaxis in which oxygen plays the role of both the attractant and the repellent. Aerotaxis occurs without methylation adaptation, and it leads to fast and complete aggregation toward the most favorable…
Which properties of metabolic networks can be derived solely from stoichiometric information about the network's constituent reactions? Predictive results have been obtained by Flux Balance Analysis (FBA), by postulating that cells set…
In this Chapter, we ask questions (1) What is the right way to measure the quality of information processing in a biological system? and (2) What can real-life organisms do in order to improve their performance in information-processing…